Sun 25 Jan 2009
David L. Vineyard on PHILIP ATLEE’S JOE GALL SERIES.
Posted by Steve under Authors , Characters[2] Comments
Older posts on this blog often receive comments containing interesting viewpoints or insights that it’s a shame that they’re buried where regular readers of this blog aren’t likely go back and find them. In particular David Vineyard has been going through the entire backlog of posts, and over the past few days he’s been leaving an impressive array of both opinions and information throughout this blog about what he’s found.
So over the next week or so, I’m going to be re-posting many of the comments he’s left, hoping to make sure the work he’s done receives the widest audience possible.
There’ll be no frills on these. No cover images or bibliographies, for example — they’ll have been done in the original posts. You’ll have to go back and read those anyway. Nor will I usually add a reply of my own, but please feel to respond yourself, if you feel so inclined.
First up, David’s reply to George Kelley’s overview of the Joe Gall series:
“That isn’t a condemnation of the series as a whole, nor representative of them, but there is a fine line between being ‘outspoken’ in ones opinions and outright offensive and Atlee seems to sometimes cross that line.
“Of course if you are going to read older popular fiction you have to park more modern sensibilities or at least cut the author and characters some slack for being men of their time, but this isn’t an isolated incident in only one Gall book. I will grant, however, that Atlee may have simply intended to stay true to the nature of Gall’s Southern redneck character and not have shared the words he sometimes put in Gall’s mouth.
“John Buchan has been criticized for having a character in The 39 Steps refer to a Jewish character with ‘an eye like a rattlesnake’ with almost no one noting that Buchan was a close friend of Bernard Baruch, and the character in the book is a paranoid American who proves to be 100% wrong about the nature of the conspiracy he has uncovered. If I’m being overly sensitive and unfair to Atlee I apologise, perhaps he was just too convincing in the same way Buchan was.
“Certainly the early Gall books represent a refreshing use of the hardboiled voice in the spy novel, and there is much to appreciate in Atlee’s books, but I have to admit once in a while he would have been better served by a more keen-eyed editorial hand.”
To which Mark Lazenby has already responded:
“Please allow me one ‘but’ — while my memory of this series is now clouded by more than 30 years (I read the books as a teenager taking hand-me-downs from my father) my now-faded recollection is that I admired Atlee’s Gall character for his repudiation of Redneck views and ways despite his (somewhat eccentric) residency in the heart of small-town Arkansas. I can recall occasional rants that I interpreted not literally but as — quoting your correspondent — ‘sardonic in the Richard Condon way.’
“This certainly motivates me to dig through the attic, locate one of the old, later Gall’s and give it a read. I will wager this series would resell in reprint.”
January 28th, 2009 at 6:17 am
Mark is right that Gall is a complex character, which is one reason I stayed with the books even when they sometimes made me uncomfortable. And to be fair there are passages when Gall pretends to be racist in order to play a role, but as the sixties became more volatile and violent and racial troubles moved to the forefront Atlee seemed to move sharply to the extreme right on race.
It may well be he was only exploiting the headlines and I’ll grant it has been a long time since I read a Gall novel from that period, but even in the early books there are brief passages that make a modern reader cringe a bit.
I’m not branding Atlee as a racist by any means. Hopefully someone well read in the saga will see one of these and correct my impression, because the Gall books were certainly well written and I would be happy to discover I’ve misread something or at least misremembered it.
What I do recall though is a discomfort reading some of the later Gall books, and I mean something more than wishing Matt Helm would drop his obsession with women in pants or being annoyed at James Bond’s snobbery. I would be delighted to find I misread Atlee’s point, but for now I still have that impression of something nasty and uneeded dragging down a good writer’s work.
Other than that I agree with Mark that the Gall books deserve to be rediscovered and hopefully Hard Case will think about reprinting one of the early ones like The Green Wound Contract or the Silken Baroness Contract or even one of Atlee’s non series books. If the rampant racism,classism, and jingoism of the Bulldog Drummond books can be excused and those reprinted, then Atlee should be given a break. After all there are passages in Chandler and Hammett that produce a cringe too, and I’m not ready to give up Charlie Chan or Mr. Moto for the sake of political correctness, so perhaps we can excuse Atlee and Gall, or at least separate the wheat from the chaff.
July 1st, 2011 at 11:09 pm
On the matter of Joe Gall being racist, we should remember the last pages of the Judah Lion Contract, where Joe quotes the lament of a Native American chief about having no descendants as he regrets not being able to marry the black woman, Maryam Lalibela, because of the social realities of where he lived. Given the time and place of the books, Joe is about as free of prejudice as could be expected.